ABSTRACT
A conceptual framework does a number of useful things. It identifies and describes the things one should be looking at, it outlines the essential relationships between them, and it provides some sort of explanation for how and why these things connect and interact. The work of practitioners often begins with a specific problem. Theory may, at the outset, be used to help frame the practitioner's approach. Even when theories do not work, they may often illuminate areas of ignorance, providing guideposts to new investigations, new methods, or new approaches to analysis and understanding. Practitioners, like the academically based anthropologists before them, gain new knowledge by going out into the field and engaging with other human beings. This is what fuels the exchange of good ideas, and ultimately what makes theory possible. The study was a landmark, providing day-to-day insight into how complicated and difficult it was to carry out what some had naively considered a straightforward social program.
